Somehow I didn't get much done today. Much of the time was spent completing my
(preliminary) analysis of the lens comparisons I did yesterday. But I suppose I don't
always have to do something important.

The numbers on the left are the tag numbers, unfortunately without any structural
information. 0x0201, the Lens Type, is in the Olympus Equipment Tags section
(see perldoc Image::ExifTool::TagNames for more information), and it seems that this
is what DxO looks at. Lens Model is in the main tags list, and it appears irrelevant.
Independently of the Lens Model string, it displays:

That's not what the lens reports, which is LEICA DG SUMMILUX 25/F1.4. Instead, it
seems to come from the
file c:\Users\grog\AppData\Local\DxO_Labs\DxO OpticsPro 11\CAFList110.db,
apparently a list with data for all known lenses, 8 MB in size. But this is just for
display purposes: it doesn't change the Lens Model string in the output EXIF.

The other thing of interest there is tag 0x020b, “Lens Properties”, apparently a
bit map. I wonder what wisdom is stored there.

Into town this morning for yet another blood test—also the signal that I'm allowed to drink
alcohol again—and
another Glucose Tolerance
Test. Normally you only need one, and I had one ten years
ago, and failed. In all likelihood it'll just be
another wasted 2 hours.

While waiting for my Glucose
Tolerance Test, a call came in on my Android phone. Pressed
on the green phone emblem. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing. Hit it as hard as I dared.
Nothing.

The call was from Yvonne, so I called her back with no
problems. But why couldn't I answer it? Do I first have to unlock the phone? You don't
need that with the iPhone, and
it really doesn't make sense. It's also (superficially) undocumented.

I've been using phones for over 60 years, and computers for nearly 40. There must be
something seriously wrong if I can't answer a phone call. Of course, it doesn't help that I
can't try it out at home.

Later Callum Gibson reminded me of what I think I had already discovered, but then
forgotten: of course you don't simply press on the icon: you swipe. That's clearly so intuitive that I had already forgotten it. What a
violation of POLA!

The Australian media have been full of a rather strange news item for the past few days:
having failed to offload the inmates of their prison camps
in Nauru
and Manus Island to Asian countries,
it seems that the Australian Government made an arrangement with the US Government to
transfer 1,250 inmates to the USA.

That's clearly not the direction that Donald Trump is aiming for. Most of
the prisoners were refugees from his Bad Seven countries (Muslim, and of no economic value
to the USA). But still, they said, they would hono(u)r the deal.

Well, until details emerged of a phone call between Trump
and Malcolm Turnbull, the
current Prime Minister of
Australia. It's still not clear where the information came from—it was, after all,
confidential, one of a number of calls that Trump had made that day to world leaders. But
once again it showed Trump from the side we're coming to expect: once again he
bragged about the magnitude of
his electoral college
win—clearly nothing more than drawing attention to a deficiency in the US electoral system.
And he termed the call “this was the worst by far”. How could Australia expect the USA to
take 2,000 prisoners from Australia (in the process confirming my suspicion that he is
mathematically challenged)? And he terminated the call after only 25 out of a scheduled 60
minutes.

From an Australian perspective, it's difficult to assess the impact of this call. For
Turnbull, not a man I admire, it has the advantage of positioning him as the winner, almost a statesman. But the foreign
press pounced on it: it was front page news on the major US newspapers, and people drew
attention to the fact that Australia is one of the staunchest allies of the USA. It would
be easy to wonder how long that will last, but in all probability it'll last longer than
Trump.

In that connection, it's interesting to note what the Iranis are doing. Launching a missile seems to be a silly thing to do at this juncture, even if (as
seems probable to me) it was not in contravention of their international agreements, which
puts them one step ahead of the current USA
government. After Trump's vague threats, the boiled down to:

A top adviser to Iran’s supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on
Thursday that Iran would not be intimidated by threats from “an inexperienced person.”

Or maybe. While following up links, they changed. But who knows, they will probably return.

The real problem I see is that this kind of needling could prompt Trump to declare war
on Iran. That makes no sense at all, and it
would further damage the image of the USA in the region, but why should that stop him?

You don't need to be a genius to understand that Donald Trump's rejection of immigration
(from Muslim countries of no economic advantage to
the USA) is misplaced. All these two-year
olds and pregnant women! Who knows what they could do? Clearly Trump doesn't. Here a
statistic from Statista:

Somehow US politics isn't letting up,
including from the amazing amount of satire, like this. And it seems that White House staff are also less than satisfied, to judge by the amount of leaked information, including details of the call between Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull. But what
really got me, on the news, was Trump standing up on his hind legs and proclaiming “We will
not allow a beachhead of intolerance to spread in our nation”.

But then the New York Timesreports that the Trump administration has asked the government
of Israel to put on hold their plans to
expand their illegal settlements
in Palestine. That's the first good
news I've heard in a while, but how long will it last? And why has it only been reported by
the New York Times?

In fact, this makes a whole lot of sense. I had already opined that the Irani action was
not a good idea. I really can't imagine that Donald Trump was behind it: he would
have been far less subtle. The real question is to what extent Iran is supporting
terrorism, to what extent it is trying to even things out in the region, and to what extent
it is fighting its private battle
with Saudi Arabia. But the Saudis
are our friends, right? And the Iranis are our enemies? That's what both governments and
press tell us, unless it's alternate governments
like Russia or alternate new sources like
Aljazeera (the latter of which doesn't
really voice an opinion). And of course all the terrorist attacks in the West have come
from Iran, right? In fact, though it's possible some were, I can't think of a single
example. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia has been implicated in many.

Yes, I can't read it either. But you wouldn't want to use more than 30% of a full screen
display, would you? This image is made out of 11 individual images, and thus misses out at
least one image of a group. But it's clear to the naked eye that the recognition doesn't
work at all. And the result is nonsense:

Press “Start”. It does remember the last working directory, and It shows two
file selection windows, both empty, one for the source and one for the destination.
Pressing “Select Folder” allows it to continue and (at least here) do the right thing.

When done, fromHDR

And that worked, sort of. The images are still really gaudy, and the heuristics
in fromHDR (I think) are broken. Spent some time looking at that, but didn't have
time to finish it.

How do real people do this stuff? My guess is that it would have landed in the “too hard”
basket long before my problems surfaced.

I have a recipe for
chicken biriani, but the last time I
updated it was 15 August 2005, though the commit log suggests that I
haven't made the dish since 13 December 2002, over 14 years ago. In that
time, I've changed many things: the quantities are still in things like spoons, the page format was antiquated, and I
got the distinct impression that the quantities were wrong. 1 kg chicken and only 300 g
rice? That can't be right. In that case, I increased to 400 g rice.

The results? Not bad, but far too much (I should have seen that), and in proportion not
enough rice. The recipe required serious updating.

Nele Kömle along today, for the first time in years without son Nelson: he's off
in New Zealand with his father.
Instead she brought Christine, a German girl
from Trier, her current working visitor.

In the past we've always fed her when she comes, initially in the evening, when she didn't
live that far away. But since she has moved
to Gavroc, 120 km away, that's no longer
so easy. So for a while we served lunch, something that we no longer eat. Today we went a
step further and served breakfast (or is that brunch?), round midday.

So finally a James RobartUS Federal Judge has
done what others should have done before, and completely blocked Donald Trump's rejection of immigration
(from Muslim countries of no economic advantage to
the USA). I saw part of the trial on TV, and
it was interesting to note that the attorney from
the US Department of
Justice wasn't able to answer the question as to how many terrorists attacks had been
committed on US soil by people from the countries in question
since 11 September 2001.
She wasn't able to answer. But Judge Robarts was: none.

As the law provides, appeals are allowed, and the first took place and was rejected. But
clearly this is just the first step.

Bravo to the USA for having such provisions!
Not even the President is beyond the law. Well, that's what the law says. What does the
President say?

And this is a person who swore an oath of allegiance to the constitution? Insulting judges,
in this case even one appointed by a previous
(Republican)
president? Complaining about a rule in the constitution that is showing its worth now more
than ever? Ugh!

Last Monday I bought a new weather station. And finally today I got a parcel
notification, so off
to Napoleons to pick it up.

Only it wasn't a weather station. It was some negative sleeves that had been sent from
the United Kingdom on 27 January,
3 days earlier (and 11 days after purchase, coincidentally from eBay seller roxy*books, better known for
selling lenses at 5 times the list price). So what has Australia Post been doing with my weather station?
It's only 114 km from Melbourne to
Napoleons. A persistent snail would have been faster.

The background of my weather station:
when we moved to Stones
Road, I left the old weather station behind, not a good idea. It wouldn't have been so
difficult to remove the external parts, and I doubt that Barry Ryan uses it. Still, I
needed a new one, and it was time.

I bought a station that looks like my old one, since I have software for it. But Daniel
O'Connor has a similar weather station, which he runs with pywws. His unit is a WH3080, and
it seems that it returns additional information,
including insolation.

OK, he has the source, even if it's
in Python. So I
downloaded the software and went looking for something compared to my data record
definition:

What does a python header file look like? I don't know: I didn't find one. When I finally
found the definition, it wasn't of the input record at all, but of an internal
representation, round line 667 of src/pywws/WeatherStation.py:

Comparing the two wasn't too difficult, especially since I already have comments describing
the records. They seem to have recognized the purpose of the structure
member mumble2, which I didn't understand. What's the meaning? Ah, that's in the
program text:

I still haven't found a tidy way to process my HDR images with
HDR Projects 4. The automatic
recognition of sequences is terminally broken, and the output names that it creates are
bizarre to say the least. It wasn't helped by the fact that some of my file names were
subsets of others, for example:

This represents three images with the base
names house-from-ssw-2, house-from-ssw-2-0 and house-from-ssw-2-1. But
when sorted by name, as above, the last component image of house-from-ssw-2 is after
the other two, and HDR Projects merrily merges them in the wrong sequence. A real operating
system could list them by modification timestamp, but I can't do that here.

After a lot of messing around, came up with the following scheme:

Create a link file name starting with the numeric time_t timestamp, for example:

This ensures that the files are in the correct sequence, and it works.

The next problem, however, was the output file name. In this case, the time stamp of the
third image was one second later, and this causes HDR Projects to create an even more
bizarre name. Here two result files from above:

So I had to fake it: if the time stamp increments by one second only, ignore it and use the
initial time stamp. That worked, and I was just left with renaming the images back to
something more legible. Strip time stamp again, along with the underscores and things, and
I end up with:

After that, I didn't have the energy to handle processing these new names. Ideally it
should be the same as for the output files with my old processing method, so that I can use
the same scripts to stitch them.

Sometimes I think commercial software is more of a pain than it's worth.

Spent far too much time today completing the scripts I needed to make panoramas using the
output from HDR Projects 4. It
works, but I still have the issue with excessive saturation.

And then I discovered that there is a new version out, HDR Projects 5, conveniently with the same
URL as version 4. Why didn't they tell me? It has all sorts of marvellous additions,
maybe, for an upgrade price only round 4 times what I paid for the previous version. No
explicit comparison with the previous version. Still, maybe they have fixed a couple of
bugs along the way. There's a free trial version, of course, so I tried that for
comparison.

Result: I can't tell any difference. All the previous bugs are still there.
About the only thing I discovered was another button that I hadn't noticed before, “HDR
Default Settings”. My previous images were created with “Entropy (soft)” (!), but there's
also an “Entropy (very soft)”, so I tried that. Here the comparison, first my standard
procedure, then HDR 4 with “Entropy (soft)”, then HDR 5 with “Entropy (very soft)”. Run the cursor over either image to compare with the partner, and click to
see a larger version:

I'm sure that the only difference between the results from versions 4 and 5 (apart from the
“watermark”) is in the default setting “very soft”. The best you can say is that it's
coming closer to normal. But I don't need an upgrade for that, and though it's gaudier, the
gradation is now worse than my old version.

Time to make some new dal, something that
I don't do very often. Today, for some reason, it didn't go as smoothly as usual. Normally
I use equal quantities of mung
dal, tur dal
and masur dal. Today I used green/grey
lentils (don't know an Indian name) instead of the mung dal, but otherwise things were much
the same.

But some of the dal remained uncooked, even after hours. It wasn't the green/grey dal, but
the tur dal. Why? Are they too old?

Today it was Yvonne who pointed out to me that we had had a
short power failure overnight, apparently at 0:02. I suppose we can live with that.

In the evening, though, the UPS in my office cut
in. Low voltage again: 211 V. Should I report it? Last time they expended a lot of effort
doing nothing of use, and tomorrow there's a short scheduled power outage (15 minute window)
that I suspect is related to the matter, so this time I didn't report it.

The unit itself seems to be well-nigh identical to the one I bought nearly 8 years ago. Even the bizarre
cable lengths and two-part mounting pipe haven't changed. Only this time did it occur to me
that, though the wind direction sensor needs to be aligned, there's no way of stopping the
two parts of the pipe from rotating relative to each other. Here the old and new stations
mounted:

Next, since my software talks to Wunderground, I had to register a new weather station. Somehow this site annoys me. Since I last signed up, they have
dropped modern units in favour of mediæval ones. I had to enter altitude in feet! That
really requires a calculator, for no good reason. And then I had other stange fields to
fill in: Neighborhood [sic] and two other fields: Website and URL. What does that
mean? I was also no longer able to report my weather station name, and it was unable to
determine the time zone based on my geographical location. Why not? At least partially
because it doesn't want to know about the Australia/Melbourne time zone. I had to
enter Australia/Sydney.

And the software? I wrote it myself, so it must be right. First, recompile,
marvelling at the warnings (time_t is long, not int). But it
couldn't find the device. Different IDs? No, no change. The whole loop searching USB
devices didn't find any device. I had to run it as root.

And then, after sorting out a new station ID, it ran into a loop. Further investigation
showed that it was trying to read page 0 from the station, and the magic numbers didn't
agree. I had:

And the data I read in ended in 0xaa55, but the rest was different. Why? One part
could be a misassumption about the length of the magic number (0xaa55 is quite
common), but I have other code that I can compare with, once I get used to looking
at python. Enough
for one day.

My dal was still crunchy this morning.
That should at least have been long enough soaking, so I cooked it for another hour. Still
crunchy. Put it in the oven and baked for another 3 hours. Still crunchy. This must have
something to do with the ingredients. It's not too bad, so I'll have to put up with it.

On with the weather station software today. After setting the magic numbers to 16 bits,
everything just worked. For at least 10 minutes. And then I ran into the problems I had
always had with the old unit: non-recoverable EBUSY on reading the unit. So once
again I have to crash and restart the program.

That's no worse than it ever was, but why? Daniel O'Connor is running pywws and doesn't report that kind
of problem. I need to investigate what the difference is.

Power outage almost as planned today. The window was 10:30 to 10:45, and the outage was
from 10:35 to 10:46.

But I have a generator, right? Yes, in fact I have two. But I couldn't get the things to
run. They both did the same thing: started happily enough, spluttered for a while, then
stopped. Repeatable. There's petrol there, all the connections seem correct. Low oil
level? You'd think that would be easy enough to check, but in fact it's almost impossible
thanks to the stupid design. I'll have to check it some time, but in any case the outage
was short enough that the UPSs were able to hold
out.

Into town in the afternoon to hear the results of my various health checks. Almost perfect!
Well, certainly much better than before, so it looks as if my low-alcohol regime is here to
stay. And I failed
the Glucose Tolerance
Test, as I had expected, but only just. Here the results for this month and ten years ago:

Date

Limit

7 June 2007

2 February 2017

1 h

11.0

17.0

11.2

2 h

8.0

11.7

7.3

That's quite a surprising difference. What caused it?

While in town, also picked up my new glasses. Yes, they're better in mid-range vision, and
pretty much unchanged for near and far. But what really surprised me was that I found them
so strange when I walked out of the shop, though it didn't last long. Clearly eyes do a lot
of adaptation to new glasses.

On the way back home from Ballarat,
found a toy poodle walking down
the Ballarat-Colac
road about 5 km from the turnoff into Grassy Gully Road. Not a good place for him, so I
stopped and called him. He had a collar, so I put him in the car and headed off home,
slightly concerned that maybe he lived just round the corner. But he still shouldn't have
been there.

On the corner of Grassy Gully Road, saw a car coming out. What are the chances that it had
anything to do with the dog? Pretty much 0, but not quite. So I waved and stopped the car.
Sure enough, she was looking for a little black poodle, so I was able to reunite them.
Turned out that she was the wife of Steve, the bloke who towed us out of Westons Road
2½ years ago.

I've been planning to rearrange my monitors for some time, but there are various issues with
the connections between display cards and monitors, both because of the length and because
of the kind of cable. In particular, the 27" monitor requires a dual
link DVI cable, and the one I have is too
short for where I want to put it.

So a couple of weeks ago I ordered a 3 m cable on eBay, and yesterday it arrived. For a dual link cable it was remarkably thin, and it
didn't work. On checking I discovered that only 12 of the pins were connected, not even the
single pin for analogue return. I suspect that it works for single-link connections, but
that doesn't help me. Fail.

I've had discussions about el-cheapo stuff on eBay over the years. In this case it failed,
but there have been remarkably few such failures. On the whole I think I should stick to my
approach, but certainly seller gogo-life goes onto my black list.

Not only had I forgotten how flaky the transmission from my weather station was, it seems
that the software has also forgotten its sanity checks. Once again I was getting outside
temperatures of -3276.7° and rainfall of similar negative values. I fixed worked
around that all years ago. When I have a little time I'll have to check if I have the right
version of the software.

The Australian National Broadband Network may
be modern, and it's certainly an order of magnitude faster than anything I have ever had
before, but reliability? Not up to scratch. A quick search of my diary shows prolonged
outages on 1 June 2014 (1
hour), 29 October 2014 (10
hours), 19 February 2015 (40
minutes), 12 March 2015 (“all day”), 27 October 2015 (40 minutes) 30 November 2015 (multiple short outages). Today we had another outage, from 13:48:03 to 17:08:22. This
time it seemed that the issue could have been with the registration:
the NTD showed normal status, but there
was no response to the DHCP requests.

A couple of days ago I noted
low power supply voltage again, only 211 V (the acceptable range is 218 V to 253 V). But
then came the planned outage, presumably to do some corrective maintenance, so I didn't report it.

OK, that needs reporting, so I did. And some time later the power failed
altogether. Sigh Why do these things all happen together, and when my
generators are non-functional?

Outside and found a van from Powercor in
front of the front door, engine still running. He hadn't bothered to inform us of his
arrival, had take a look inside the meter box and accidentally tripped the main switch.
Back on and all was well.

And of course he didn't find anything. By the time he arrived, the voltage was back to an
almost too exactly normal 230 V. Like his colleagues, he assumed that it was another
consumer taking lots of power. I mentioned that in every case it had happened in late
afternoon on a hot day, and he promptly decided it must be an illicit drug lab. Why at this
time of the day? Ah, he didn't know about that. When they got home?

It's worth thinking through the idea of a drug lab, not helped by my lack of knowledge of
what is needed. For me, electricity suggests light, which suggests plants—almost
certainly marijuana. But why spend
lots of money on power when there's bright sunshine outside, not to mention lots of space?

More to the point, though: how much power would you need to draw the power down by 40 V?
His hair drier (8 A) managed 2 V, so it would need at least 160 A to drop the voltage by
that much. And no property round here has a power connection offering anything like that
much power; most, like us, have no more than 50 A. Still, it's clearly an issue that they
are clearly intent on following up on. From my point of view, it's time to think about
monitoring the UPS.

Yvonne off with Chris Bahlo and Margaret Swan today to a
horse clinic with Arne Koets
in Smythes Creek, leaving me to
prepare the dinner. That was Indian (Margaret is vegetarian), and though most dishes were
in the deep freeze, it kept me going for much of the afternoon.

After spending considerable time this week trying to tame HDR Projects, all seemed right for my
house photos today. Today there was no
sun and thus much less contrast, but that shouldn't make such a difference. I followed the
workflow that I had established earlier in the week, but the results didn't come out quite as I expected. The grass
areas are particularly obvious. Run the cursor over either image to
compare with the partner, and click to see a larger version:

You can say what you will about Donald Trump, and most people do, but he's certainly making his presence felt. And I
think he must be the most satirized ridiculed political person I have ever come
across. We normally never watch TV after dinner. but the recent spate of “Want to be
second” video clips kept us busy for a second Saturday evening watching them. Unfortunately
the everysecondcounts web site is a real
pain, and they're missing a number of clips, so it's time to make own collection, which I'll complete in the next
day or so.

Off to Smythes Creek this morning
to take some photos of Yvonne and Arne Koets during the clinic. A
couple of days ago people were complaining about the heat, and
in New South Wales they had the
hottest day on record—claims of up to 47.6°. But here it didn't manage over 13°, and it was distinctly chilly.

The venue offered its own specific challenges: it was open from all sides, making automatic
exposure very difficult. In retrospect I should maybe have chosen manual exposure, but
instead I used spot exposure, which worked much of the time. I used the Zuiko Digital ED 35-100mm
f/2.0 on the E-M1 and the Summilux 25 mm f/1.4 on the E-PM1.
Some of the photos didn't turn out too badly:

A total of about 2 mm, mainly in the morning. Where did my weather station get the idea
that there was so much rain in the afternoon? Poor contacts? Just more flakiness? A bug
in my software (perish the thought!)? I'll have to keep an eye on it, but not today.

A fairly common German dish
is Jägerschnitzel (“hunter's
schnitzel”), pork schnitzel with a mushroom sauce. It's so German that I was surprised to
discover that the sauce is French in origin (« sauce chasseur », or “hunter's sauce”). Not
a bad idea for a change, and a week or two ago Yvonne made
one that didn't seem quite the way I recall it. So today it was my turn. Once again the
luck of the draw on the web, and I based my recipe on this recipe,
this overview and
this
recipe, none of which was overly convincing.

My own recipe wasn't perfect either—I hadn't compensated enough for the quantities in the
base recipes. But it wasn't bad, and next time it should be a lot better.

Watching Aljazeera News on YouTube is getting more reliable, but there's a down
side: commercials. One of the most popular ones is “You need a web site” from a company who clearly doesn't do business in Germany.

I suppose they're right. I do need a web site. But then, I've had one for over 20
years. Still, it's free, so why not try it out? And since it's modern, I don't need (nor
find) any documentation. Just fire away:

What are Wix ADI and Wix Editor? No idea, and they're not telling me. Select “Editor”, and
next I need a website template. Again, no idea what it all means. Online Language Course?
Boutique La Firm? But after a bit of messing around I get a suggestion:

For some time I've been having trouble with my bread not rising well. And it also seems a bit dry. So how about a bit more water?
This time I added 11% more water and tried like that. It rose well, up to a point, but
still not as much as it has done in the past. I need to leave the bread to rest before
eating, so it'll be a day or two before I find what it tastes like.

Into Ballarat today mainly to have a
haircut, which was long overdue. Also took the generators for inspection, but couldn't find
Brad, who wasn't where I had understood him to be.

That was a problem, since I also wanted to pick up a used movable air conditioner for Chris
Bahlo. How could I get it into the back of the car with the generators already there?

Easily, as it turned out. There was plenty of space. Allan (who sold us the air
conditioner) recognized the generators as coming from ALDI, and commented that they were quite good little units, but that they didn't like
having the petrol left in the tank.

And that's exactly one of the potential reasons that I had thought out for why they didn't
run. OK, without spending a lot of money, how about draining the petrol and trying with
fresh petrol? That's not really a solution, of course, since it means refuelling the things
when you're in a hurry to turn them on, and raises the question about what to do with the
drained petrol. But at least it could give me an indication of whether that's the problem,
and time to consider why it should be a problem.

Petrol for four-stroke engines doesn't contain any heavier components, so it can't be
sedimentation or similar. Could the lighter fractions evaporate? That's quite possible.
Driving to town and back again was enough to notice that a strong smell of petrol emanates
from the devices. Maybe covering the filler cap when not in use would make a difference.

Chris was with Arne Koets again, this
time at Kryal Castle with Yvonne and Margaret Swan, where they were apparently engaged
in historical
European martial arts. Photos to follow, but it was an ideal time to drop the air
conditioner off at her place, since she didn't know about it: nothing like a surprise. Thus
past the ferocious dog (Nina, who previously was very friendly, but now was doing guard duty
in front of the house), and into the lounge room:

Why? Contact with the enemy. It's not clear that he divulged any important information,
but covering up after the event didn't help. And the way things are being handled, this
looks like the beginning of a big unravelling. It seems that Trump has difficulty finding
people who are prepared to “work” with him, and with whom he is prepared to work. Who will
replace Flynn in the long term?

Other presidents traditionally have 100 days to establish themselves. In Trump's case, it
looks like every 10 days bring something new.

That's the start of the message, clearly invalid markup and requiring fonts that I neither
have nor desire. Even quoting it here uncorrected would cause the page to fail the
validity checkers. It's more readable as:

I was wondering if there was an opportunity to
work together
to promote your business online - seeing that
Google.com.au
has your website
http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-feb2001.php
indexed in position
10
for the search term
"Snow shovels in Canberra"
.

Not a single link in the noisily marked up text, and a mention of a 15 year old page. I was
going to say “with no reference to snow shovels”, but that's not quite correct:

Yvonne took 336 photos yesterday with two cameras, along with
a number of long videos, filling up two SD
Cards and draining a battery in the process. Problem: the battery was in the E-PM1, which
forgets the date after a battery change. So all her photos after that came out dated 1
January of a year I forget.

Problem? The photos are still there. But they're out of order, not a small thing given the
number of photos. She had a good idea where they fitted between the photos taken with the
other camera (E-PM2), so all we needed to do was set the date in
the EXIF data.

How? We have a Microsoft box to process the photos, so it made sense to find a Microsoft
space program to do the conversion. Unfortunately DxO Optics “Pro” doesn't
perform that function—the only EXIF parameters it will set are Author
and Copyright. So off with Google, and found a number.

First I looked at EXIF Date
Changer, clearly intended to do exactly what I wanted. But it either costs
$20—something that would require quite a justification—or it can't support RAW, nor a
number of raw formats (not
including ORF).

That is, unless you lose your mind first. What a pain! What a Microsoft!

So I went and frobbed the PHP script that
I wrote last August for
setting EXIF data. Now all I need to do is add this in the Makejpeg file:

P1013674 Arne-Chris-7 0 t 14:25

The first two parameters are the base name of the file and the name that it will be on the
web. The third parameter,
for hysterical raisins, is a
rotation to apply, now largely obsolete. The next is a parameter (t) specifying “set
the time to next argument, and the date to the date implied in the directory”. So all you
need to do is add the date parameter and run the script into a shell. Done! The whole
thing, including updating the script, took less time than writing this diary entry.

Now clearly this is a kludge. But why not? Not everything needs complete generality. This
kludge has already saved more time than it took, and it promises even more.

Last winter Chris Bahlo had a lot of unripe tomatoes left over. I hate throwing things
away, so I asked her to bring them over here, about 2½ kg of tomatoes in varying stages of
ripeness and putrefaction. I froze what was usable, taking up space in the freezer that
considerably irritated Yvonne. Finally it's time to do
something about it (and no, it seems that Chris hasn't grown any tomatoes this year).

What to do? After thawing them out, they lost a large quantity of liquid (probably a Good
Thing), and I was left with just over 1 kg. Fried 225 g of onions and 15 g garlic in oil,
then puréed the tomatoes and added them, along with 15 g salt. To my surprise, the result
looked quite acceptable:

More curry laksa for breakfast today,
this time with Tean's
Gourmet cooking paste. It's surprisingly similar to the “MARION'S KITCHEN” paste from
ALDI. About the biggest difference is that
they don't supply the coconut cream.

Results? Not bad. Now I can write up the recipe, even if it is subject to change.

The summer started out with insufficient irrigation. That changed, but not enough for
everything to catch up. There are signs, though, that things are improving. In particular,
the roses are coming up well:

You've got to say one thing about Donald Trump: he sticks to his stupid claims. Today, during an appearance
with Benyamin Netanyahu, he
retracted the US insistence on
the two-state solution.
Idiot! Surely even he can see that the current Israeli actions are in the interest of
neither Israel
nor Palestine. And they're certainly
not in the interests of the USA. If there's
anything more likely to inspire “Islamist” terrorism against the USA, I can't think of it.

Apart from that, ridicule prevails. Somebody vandalized modified the Wikipedia
page Puppet. Jamie Fraser told me about it on IRC, and I went to show it to Yvonne. But by that time Jamie had “fixed” it. The right thing to do,
of course, but I wish he had waited.

And then there's a web site with the unsavoury name whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday that
carries a better chronology of Trump's problems than I could.

A couple of weeks ago DxO published reports on the
best zoom lenses and the best prime
lenses for the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II. Clearly they have tested them, so sooner or later the
modules should become available. Today I checked, and once again the automatic check had
failed: yes, support is available, so spent some some downloading the new version of
DxO Optics “Pro” and the modules for my lenses.

That was one of the the two triggers for me to buy the camera. The other was a special
offer like they did with the Olympus OM-D
E-M1. But so far there's no sign of that. And unlike last time, the prices here are
(barely) not lower than in the USA. So what
do I do? Somehow I'm still uncomfortable with the idea of spending $2,750 on a camera. But
my experience has shown—sadly—that the 2 year warranty is well worth while. So for the
moment I'll just keep an eye on what's being offered.

I also receive daily mailings from leading US
newspapers, in particular the Washington
Post and the New York Times. What did
they have to say about it? Fake News! Well, they did mention it, but clearly it wasn't of
interest to either newspaper.

But there are media in other parts of the world, and there were followups. Here what Trump
said, and what Nikki Haleysaid:

Trump: “I’m looking at two-state and one-state. And I like the one that both parties
like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one.”

Haley: "First of all, the two-state solution is what we support. Anybody that wants to say
the United States does not support the two-state solution - that would be an error,"

That's only marginally not a contradiction. But it scares me less than the fact that the
whole issue doesn't seem to be of interest to people in the USA.

Seven years ago Peter Jeremy gave me
some suckers from a Murraya
koenigii, more commonly known as curry tree. Only one of them survived, and it has had
a hard time of it. Recently Peter wanted a photo, so here it is:

What went wrong there? The problem is indicative of flash shots taken with too high a
shutter speed. The camera has a flash shutter speed rating of 1/320 s, but these were taken at 1/250 s.
On the other hand, when I dropped the speed to 1/125 s, the image was correct.

What causes that? There are a number of possibilities, all of which suggest a random
glitch:

The shutter could have malfunctioned, setting itself to, say, 1/640 s. But that's
unlikely: I would have seen it in other non-flash shots as well.

Kodachrome has a great reputation for
colour stability, and my own films from the 1960s confirm this. But today I had a different
issue: when were the photos taken? In the process discovered that many of the
scanned slides had been done with the ill-fated Canon
9900F scanner. Time to rescan. And then I discovered that one film, taken between
September and November 1968, hadn't been developed until November 1969. And on the whole the photos weren't too
bad.

Possibly the focus issues were due to me taking the photo at f/1.4. One of the things that
people forget nowadays is that even with manual exposure, one knows the shutter speed and
aperture. In those days you had to look at the camera to see what you had set.

Somehow the Trump stupidity is coming in smaller doses. Overall it doesn't seem to have
become any less: there are more smaller things.

But why does he keep harping on his election victory and inauguration? Nobody accurately
counted the inauguration crowds, but the election results are beyond dispute, in particular
that he gained a majority in
the Electoral College despite
losing the popular vote.

But now he's talking about a “landslide” in the Electoral College. Why? First, who cares?
He got elected. And secondly, it's Just Plain Wrong. Statistasummarizes:

Spent much of the day rescanning old slides from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Most of
them have been scanned already, but badly, with the Canon
9900F scanner. Now that I have the corresponding diary entries online, I know more
accurately when the photos were taken. For example, this photo was taken on 23 March 1970, something that I couldn't have determined without the diary:

It's supposed to handle 16/48 bit colour, but it seems that the colour balance veers off to
blue in the shadows. I could lighten the shadows, but it would just look silly, though it
does reveal further details, like the registration plate:

More photo scanning and processing today. It takes forever! I thought that the scanning
itself (about 4 minutes per slide) would be the most of it, but finding the date taken and
frobbing the EXIF data is also painful. I
ended up digging out my old slide viewer, something that I thought I would never use again:

And then there are decisions to make: the slides are scanned
in TIFF format, which, at 36 MB each, is too
large to keep. Convert
to PNG? OK, that
lowers it to about 9 MB. Should I put the images on the web as PNG
or JPEG? It seems that I can attach EXIF
data to PNG, though it's not clear that it's kosher.

Of course, looking back to my diary entries of 50 years ago, I see that things did
take such a long time, especially in the darkroom. It's just that I have refined my methods
to the point where I can get things done much faster. I wonder how long it takes people
trapped in the Microsoft space.

For the time being I'm leaving the images as PNGs. It's not clear that I won't have to
revisit the whole damn thing and do them in JPEG.

Mail from dpreview today: they have
collected a page titled Photography
fundamentals explained. They're usually good value, so I went and took a look. The
page clearly needs work: the first article is (currently) titled “Sources of noise part
two”, and the title of the page itself is probably misleading. Certainly not something I
could point a beginner at to learn about photography.

One article in particular was titled What is equivalence and why should I care?. Good question, at least the first half.
But it explains: “Equivalence, at its most simple, is a way of comparing different formats
(sensor sizes) on a common basis.”. Well, not exactly a dictionary definition, but when I
say that my Leica Summilux 25 mm f/1.4 is equivalent to a 50 mm f/1.4 Summilux on a full-frame
camera, I'm using that definition. About the only thing I can fault in the description is
that they don't go into aspect ratio. Here a comparison for a Micro Four Thirds camera
with the 25 mm lens and a full-frame camera with a 50 mm lens:

Sensor format:

4/3

FT

Focal length:

25.00 mm

50.00 mm

Horizontal FOV:

38.17°

39.60°

Diagonal FOV:

46.81°

46.79°

Vertical FOV:

29.15°

26.99°

The diagonal fields of view are pretty much identical, but there are noticeable differences
in the horizontal and vertical fields of view. In particular, this can make a difference
when taking panoramas.

But the main gist of the article was about “equivalent aperture”. And somehow I'm not happy
with the term. It's time for me to write my own page on the subject, which will (hopefully) grow.

So what's wrong with the DPreview page? The choice of aperture has two effects: it controls
the amount of light entering the camera, and it modifies depth of field. Like so many
others, this doesn't make a clear enough distinction between these two functions, and in my
opinion it overemphasizes depth of field.

In particular: for exposure, there's already a clear definition of “equivalent aperture”: in
more conventional terms, it would be called
“relative aperture”, the
diameter of the aperture as a fraction of the focal length. For example, a 25 mm aperture
in a 100 mm lens is ¼ of the focal length, or f/4, where f represents the
focal length. In other words, exactly what we used to have until people forgot what it
meant and renamed it F4 (an “F-number”).
No need for any further “equivalent”.

And then there's depth of field. That's a much more complicated matter. The first question
is: how sharp is unsharp? That's defined as
a circle of confusion, but
what? In general it is chosen relative to the sensor size. My calculator currently uses a default circle of confusion of 8 μm, which in
four-thirds measurements is about 1/2150 of the sensor width (17.3 mm).

The only parameters that enter into the depth-of-field equation are focal length, aperture,
focus and circle of confusion. Keep them constant and increase the image size, say from
four-thirds to “full frame”, and what happens? Nothing. But if you look at the circle of
confusion as a fraction of the frame size, then things change. 1/2000 of 36 mm (width of a
full frame) is 18 μm. And that makes a difference if you're looking at the entire frame.
The comparison photos on page 3 show the big picture nicely. But that's not depth of field. It's extent of
unsharpness, and it results from (effectively) viewing the full frame image from double the
distance.

And there's the point. We don't just have exposure and depth of field. We have deliberate
unsharpness as well, and that's not the same thing as depth of field. I need to think more
about this, but one thing's clear: take, say,
an Olympus E-1 (horizontal resolution
2,560 pixels, or 6.75 μm per pixel) and a Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II in
high resolution mode (horizontal resolution 10,368 pixels, or 1.67 μm per pixel), and you
have an argument for completely different depths of field, even though the sensor size is
the same.

What went wrong there? I know these things are inaccurate, but this effectively fits the
definition of non-functional. If it hadn't been for the 0.3 mm (smallest increment) I would
have thought that the rain gauge is completely broken. As it is, it's only 96% broken.

Today one of my saved eBay searches paid off.
The going rate for an Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II is round AUD 2,750 (about USD 2,110), but today I found one
with Australian warranty for AUD 2,487, including postage. That's equivalent to USD 1,908.
A quick check round the world showed only one camera cheaper than that, USD 1,889 (AUD
2,460). But that's without an Australian warranty, and with USD 59 shipping, so for me it's
more expensive anyway. Clearly now's the time to buy.

But how do I pay for it? I barely have that much money in all my accounts, and if I spent
it, I wouldn't have anything to live on for the rest of the month. But that's what credit
cards are for, right? Unfortunately, eBay charges extra for credit cards. OK, find the
seller's real shop and buy directly. The eBay name is excess_camera_gear (not
exactly a reassuring name), and a quick search came up with (wait for it) http://www.excesscameragear.com.au/. Sure enough, they had it there, at the
same price, and it only took me 20 minutes to work out how to navigate their web site (hint:
they don't have a button labelled “check out now”; you have to look for the shopping cart
symbol). And of course I had to create a password conforming to their concept of security:

There is a fee to send money as a personal payment using a debit card or credit card.

Is that enough? I don't trust them that far, especially after a particularly spectacular
failure ten years ago. OK, call them up. For that I was
issued a one-time code which I had to enter. Spoke
to mumble, who repeated her name as Jedda, and told her the situation: I wanted to
buy an item on eBay and book the sum from my credit card, because there wasn't enough money
in the primary account. She told me that the rules were to take from the first account in
the list and only choose the next if the funds weren't available. And yes, no fees for
credit card.

Wonderful. And what about the dishonour fee? She didn't give me a clear answer; I suspect
that she didn't know the term, and that it wasn't in her script. But she explained how to
work around it: after selecting “pay now”, I would be given a review page, and there I could
change the payment method. OK, sounds good. To be on the safe side, I repeated the
procedure: I press pay now, am provided with a page that I accept, then go to a review page,
change the payment method, and I'm away. She confirmed and gave me a reference
number.

No choice of anything. So where did it deduct the money from? My bank showed no activity
on either account, and if PayPal has a page that shows where it deducted money, it's well
hidden. But the camera was sent, so PayPal must have told the seller it was paid for.

What's wrong with this situation?

PayPal's personnel is not adequately educated.

There's no way of finding out where PayPal has deducted the money from.

There's no way to change things. By evening there was no evidence of activity in my
account, so there would have been plenty of time to change things.

All in all, I still don't trust PayPal.

Posted the information about the camera to the Australian M43 Facebook group.
In the course of the discussion, discovered that the price had gone up. They had had 5 to
sell, and I got the first one; the others had been marked up to AUD 2,499.

Call from Lorraine Caranza this morning at 11:39 asking “Are you coming?”. Oh. She had
invited us to brunch on 7 March, two weeks today, and at the time I had wondered whether
that was the correct date. No, some misunderstanding: was supposed to be today at 11:00.

No point going over then: we had already eaten. So we arranged to go over at 18:00 for the
latest brunch of my life:

What do do? I had my virtual paper trail, but it's good to be in a position of strength, so
I first called Consumer Affairs Victoria on 1300 55 81 81 and spoke to Greg, who told me they weren't responsible for this kind of
issue: that's the Financial Ombudsman on 1300
780 808. Another 1300 number, one of the most expensive I can call. Asked him for a
“landline” number and was given 1800 367 287. It wasn't until later that I looked at the
web site and found the number +61 3 9613 7366 “(charges apply)”. In fact, it's exactly the
opposite: for me that number is free. When will people realize that the 13 and 1300 numbers
are no longer the best choice for many people?

Decided to leave that and call the bank (on +61
3 9683 9999), where I spoke to Thomas and told him that I had not authorized the deduction.
He was prepared to reverse it. There should be no charges, but if
there were, I should contact them again.

Then called PayPal after getting another one-off reference number, and spoke to Lyle, who
established that the problem was that I had “one-touch” set for my eBay purchases. Yes, I recall that, and that at the time
it took forever for them to get it to work right. He reset it for me. This raises a number
of questions:

Why didn't Jedda warn me of this yesterday?

It seems that PayPal have enough access to my eBay account to do this in the first
place. Or is it maybe a PayPal function? The interface is hard to recognize.

Why doesn't the eBay web site offer the alternative: one-touch or modify?

Why doesn't the PayPal web site show information about what external accounts it
accesses?

I asked him what to do about the fact that I had cancelled the deduction from the bank, but
he didn't seem to understand: he kept saying that the sum had been paid, so I had nothing to
worry about, and I should contact the merchant if I had any further issues. Finally he gave
me a reference number and connected me to Steve, who seemed more on the ball. In
the end he decided that when the payment was refused, it would automatically be deducted
from the next available source, in this case the credit card, so nothing more needed to be
done. At any rate they wouldn't assume foul play on my part. The only thing that he didn't
want to do was to give me a reference number, which PayPal doesn't do. I gave him the last
one and he understood, updated the records pointing to his internal ID and gave me a
reference number quite similar to the last.

He also observed that I had been a PayPal customer for a long time, apparently one of the
longest-standing customers. How long? I didn't recall, and the web site is suitably vague
(“Joined in 2001”), but saved mail tells me that I joined on 13 December 2001, somewhat more than 15 years. You can tell how old the mail is: in plain text only,
correctly formatted and with a sensible line length. How times have changed!

Steve suggested that I must know my way round the web site well by now, so I pointed out my
issues finding where the money was deducted. Ah, yes, they've rearranged the site, and
dumbed it down. He had a couple of ideas of where to start searching, but nothing definite.
Still, nice to find a human behind this telephone wall.

So I called the number and after a couple of minutes of menu selections was connected to
somebody who told me to ignore the hex code, and told me it was because they had had trouble
with Telstra. Far be it from me to exonerate
Telstra, but that's clearly not the reason. She wanted great detail before she would track
the package for me. On the one hand that makes sense, but if their web site had been
working, it would have provided the information without further authentication.

The good news: the camera is in Ballarat
already, and will be delivered here
to Dereel on Friday. I'm more than
sceptical: if it got from Sydney to
Ballarat overnight, why should it not be delivered tomorrow? A good reason is that in the
past they have never delivered here, despite claims to the contrary on every occasion. It
also seems improbable that it should not take 2 days from Ballarat to Dereel
or Napoleons. But we'll see. I'm
relatively impressed that they got the camera from Sydney to Ballarat in 18 hours.

Finally received a dual-link DVI cable for my
monitors, after the abortive attempt two weeks ago. It cost 3 times as
much, but it looks right, and yes, it works.

Spent far too much time reconfiguring X for the new
setup (exchange screens 2 and 3). There's really something strange about the configuration
for server 1, and I still don't have it right, though it's more a cosmetic issue than
anything else.

There's a problem with
the PNG images of my
old photos: they replace older JPEGs, and
old searches fail. After some consideration, I've decided to do them in JPEG after all,
which along with discarding some intermediate images has the interesting side effect of
reducing the storage requirements by nearly 90%.

Checked my bank balance again today. $6.00 overdraft fee. OK, as suggested, call up the
bank, fighting my way again through the stupid voice menu, and after 2 minutes got to
Cheryl, who promised to forward a complaint, and suggested that I try hitting 0
and # until the thing gives up.

She reverted the charge with no issues, so the only issue was the time I had to expend. And
no sign of a booking from PayPal on my credit
card. But later I got a message from them:

Resolve your negative PayPal balance

You made a payment on 20 February 2017 to . We weren't able to debit the amount from your
bank account because there were insufficient funds.

As a result, your PayPal balance is now negative. Please resolve your negative balance by
adding funds to your account as soon as possible.

And yes, the name of the recipient was really empty. Why didn't they take the funds from
the next in line? Took a look at my PayPal account, but that showed that my account was
balanced, and that the sum had been deducted. From where? It doesn't say, of course, so I
have no way of checking whether they have their money or not. None of my bank accounts
showed a change, but that's normal enough. But certainly this issue has further lowered my
opinion of PayPal.

I have established that my camera made it
to Ballarat sometime yesterday, so tried
once again to find out where it was. Another attempt to track it failed with another 64 bit
random error number.

Can this be the interface from eBay? If so,
of course, it should be able to recover, but the system is clearly badly written. So I went
straight to https://startrack.com.au/ and entered 5ZQ7580. Bingo!

My suspicions yesterday were confirmed: despite claims to the contrary, they did not
deliver it to me. But why in the name of God did they deliver it
to Wendouree, on the other side of
Ballarat? Did they deliver it to Wendouree? Worth calling them first before going
there to find a tracking error. But I couldn't find a post office in Coronet Street, not
even (according to Google Maps) the house
numbers 13-15. The closest I found, from Street View, was:

That's not a post office. OK, time to call StarTrack again, at 12:02. Once again I was put
into a hold loop and offered a call back when somebody was available. They even repeated
the phone number from which the call was recorded: 2880144000.

Huh? That has nothing to do with my real phone number. It happened yesterday too, but then
I was only able to confirm that it wasn't the correct number, and thought that it might be a
MyNetFone internal number. But no,
nothing to do with that either. Until proof of the contrary, it's a bug.

Got my call back quite quickly, at 12:06. Having to give all my personal details gradually
gets on my nerves. You don't need that for the web site (not even the silly box “I am not a
robot” if you know the final URL (https://sttrackandtrace.startrack.com.au/5ZQ75803). And she couldn't give the
phone number of the post office. In fact, she couldn't give me anything at all: she had to
refer it to an Investigator, who would call me back within the hour. She gave me a
reference number, which under the circumstances sounded like a good idea.

Clearly this is One Broken System. On a hunch, out to the letter box, where sure enough, I
had a note to pick up an item 5ZQ75803
from Napoleons post office.
By 13:00 no Investigator had called back, so off to Napoleons to pick it up. Finally
got it at 13:24, less than 44 hours after it had been sent. If their tracking had worked, I
could have picked it up nearly 4 hours (or 9%) earlier.

I never received a call back from an Investigator. I was going to call and complain,
but when I returned I found:

From a transit point of view, that's quite respectable. From a tracking point of view, it's
a total disaster:

Despite repeated claims to the contrary, they don't deliver
to Dereel. Arguably this should be
worth a refund: I have to travel 40 km to pick up an item that should have been
delivered.

Their tracking web software has unresolved failures, incorrectly reported. It is
clearly related to eBay, and it continues.

The status information is incorrect. “Ready for collection” does not mean that I can
collect it, and further things can happen to the item after “delivery” and before I
receive it. I suspect that the status “Onboard [sic] with driver for delivery”
is similarly inaccurate (in this case ¾ hour between Ballarat and Wendouree).

Tracking is not up to date. It shows that the item arrived at Napoleons post office at
9:41, well over two hours before I went looking.

In passing, it got the name of the locality wrong (NAPOLEON instead of Napoleons). To
be fair, it's quite possible that this is the mistake of Australia Post, who really should know better, as
I have seen before.

It incorrectly claims that the address in Wendouree is a post office.

It also incorrectly claims that the item could be collected in Wendouree.

The phone service people don't understand the issue either.

Despite promises, there's no follow-up on their inability to answer what should be a
routine enquiry.

Star Track indeed! I think I can safely award it a prize for the worst tracking I have
seen. About the only thing in its favour is that the list is in chronological order.

So finally I have my new Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II. I had so much to do that I haven't really had time to
look at it. Here some first impressions:

In the past I have complained about the inadequate instruction manuals for Olympus cameras.
This time it's different: it doesn't have any instructions. Well, a “quick
start” in three languages. After stripping the obligatory safety notices for other
countries, I was left with exactly 16 pages of generic information with references to page
numbers outside the document. Olympus, you're claiming that this is a professional level
camera, and you're certainly charging accordingly. The very least you could do would be to
supply an instruction manual!

First thing was to charge the battery, of course. I don't need an instruction manual for
that. Connected it up and the LED started to flash. On my old cameras, that's a code
meaning “battery defective”. Maybe I do need an instruction manual after all. Yes, sure
enough, on this camera it means “charging, less than 50% charge”. What a violation
of POLA!

I didn't have time to set up my new camera, so when we went walking with the dogs, I took my
old Olympus OM-D E-M1. And sure enough, we saw a heron that
has been round the dam lately. Turned the camera on and... nothing. The battery was
completely dead, something that I don't normally experience.

What caused that? It recharged normally, but died after only 166 photos, much less than
normal. On the other hand, looking back at previous charges, it had previously delivered (in chronological sequence) 493, 202
and 156 images, though in each case there was still some life left. So maybe it is dying
after all. The replacement batteries were a lot cheaper than the original Olympus batteries
(by a factor of 3 or 4), but they never delivered the same charge, and maybe they're
reaching the end of their life.

Made more baked beans today, with further
modifications to the recipe:

quantity

ingredient

step

375 g

dried white beans

1

water

1

240 g

onion

2

63 g

oil for frying

2

240 g

tinned tomatoes (400 g can)

3

50 g

tomato purée

3

1 g

dried oregano

3

2 g

dried rosemary

3

1 g

dried thyme

3

200 ml

water

3

10 g

beef stock powder

4

10 g

salt

4

Preparation

Soften the beans by soaking overnight.

Purée the onions in a cooking pot large enough for the beans. Fry in oil until barely
brown.,

Add all the remaining ingredients, except the salt, bring to the boil and simmer for 30
minutes.

Add salt, continue to simmer until cooked, ...

The quantity of oil was more than I had planned (the remainder of what was in the bottle),
but I decided to leave it like that to see how it turned out. The tomato paste was more
because it was a complete sachet, and the water was less because it seemed like a good idea.

But the beans didn't get soft! Is that the difference between soaking overnight and a 2
hour soak in initially boiling water? Part of that is because I don't have anything to
gently simmer a large pot. The induction cooker is too hot or too cold, the medium burner
on the gas stove is too hot, even at minimum, and the small burner heats too small an area,
cooking in the middle and leaving cool on the edges. Decided to leave it for the day and
continue tomorrow in the oven.

Off today to the Eureka Village
Hostel and the Geoffrey
Cutter Centre with Nikolai, Sasha and Yvonne.
This is becoming quite routine now, including the fact that I usually finish faster than
Yvonne. Much of this is probably because my people are more mobile than Yvonne's, and when
the weather is good, many are not there.

Our dogs have all been to the aged care facilities, but they haven't been many other places
where there are lots of people. So after the visit, took them for a walk down Bridge Mall,
where they found numerous good smells:

There were some other people with a couple of dogs, fortunately tied up—one, I think
a Golden Retriever, barked
furiously at them, and they didn't pay any attention. At the end Yvonne went into a new art shop, while I stayed outside with the dogs, and then a
couple of people came to look at them—one a volunteer for Delta, who will be
in Geelong with her dog for accreditation
in the near future.

I've had difficulty receiving calls with my iPhone in the past, so on the way
into Ballarat today I asked Yvonne to call me on the phone (in my pocket). Diverted to voice mail.
It worked later when we got into town. Why? There are numerous valid reasons, but I'll
have to research them.

I'm really quite upset about the lack of a manual for my expensive new camera. And the
pitiful “Basic Manual” has no references
to Australia, but plenty to
the USA. Is it maybe not a genuine
Australian-registered item after all, despite the warranty certificate?

Called up Olympus Australia and
spoke to Kelly, who didn't really want to know. Yes, maybe it doesn't have an Australian
warranty. I should talk to the supplier about that. That's a lot of help: they have
already said that it's genuine. So she went looking for the name of the supplier. Nope, no
Excess Camera Gear on their books.

I pressed the point, and she commented that they no longer supply instruction manuals.
They're on the CD that comes with the camera. But I got no CD, and both the “basic manual”
and the “instruction manual” (from the web) don't mention one in the list of items in the
box. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything: they also don't mention the booklet or the
warranty certificate. So I suspect that Kelly is wrong in her assumption.

She went on to say that this decision was for cost reasons, and if I wanted a printed
manual, there are plenty of companies who would print it for me. So this is standard
Olympus policy! Shame on them! And what a stupid excuse! The “basic manual” in fact is
100 pages long, because it's in 3 languages. That's more than half the length of the
horribly inadequate “instruction manual”. In addition, leaving out instructions is liable
to increase the number of support calls trying to find out how to use the damn thing, and
also increase the number of people who just can't be bothered and sell the thing again, thus
limiting their sales. In any case, it's no excuse, and I asked her to take a formal
complaint. “But we'll have to send it to Japan”. Fine. I think every purchaser should
file such a complaint.

Finally, after I insisted, she went and checked the serial number. Yes, it's Australian
stock. Why didn't she just do that 10 minutes earlier? And if they can confirm like that,
why do they need the warranty certificate (which can be forged) when sending cameras in for
repair?

Next was online registration of the camera (serial number BHUA20626; does this mean that
it's only the 626th off the assembly line?). I don't know why I bother. It hasn't helped
in the past when I sent cameras in for repair, and there's no evidence that they use the
information for anything. In addition, the page is really pretty useless. First you need
to select a category (they also do audio and binoculars, for example), and select what they
allow you to set. But it wasn't there!

They also had a category “Digital SLR”. The camera isn't an SLR, of course, but the URL
doesn't seem to want to know: http://asia.olympus-imaging.com/product/dslr/em1mk2/. So I checked that. But
yes, they were really only DSLRs. Finally I found the correct selection: Compact System
Cameras. Not a term I've seen very often; why do they do that?

Things weren't over. I was asked to answer a questionnaire. Why did I buy it? The fact
that I already had an Olympus camera apparently didn't occur to them. And then they wanted
to know how many cameras I have. Good question. Do they mean all, only digital cameras,
not mobile phones, only ones I use? After a bit of reflection, I discover I have a total of
about 16 cameras: three old film cameras, four old compact digital cameras, an old and dead
Canon 20D DSLR, about four mobile phones and—of most interest to Olympus—four Olympus
E-series cameras. Which should I count?

It turns out it doesn't matter. I have the choice of one, two, three or many
other. Do they really think that nobody has more than three? I wonder what (if anything)
they do with this information.

I've had my new Olympus
OM-D E-M1 Mark II for over a day, and I still haven't taken a photo with it. Part of
the problem is just setting it up right, and spent some time adapting my E-M1 settings page to the E-M1 Mark II. And even then I wasn't
successful. Olympus has three different ways of doing most things, and I can't find how to
set the display to show settings one at a time at the bottom of the page.

OK, how did I do it with the Mark I? I don't know! There's something to do with the
button that switches it between that and the “Super Control Panel”. But on the Mark I it
doesn't work they way the “instructions” say. For the time being, I have to give up on that
one and use the “super control panel”.

Other random things I note: the focus really does seem to be faster with Four Thirds system lenses, and
the tripod mount is in a very different place, offset by fully 12 mm along the lens axis
from the position of the Mark I. That makes a significant difference for my panorama
photos, and meant reworking my entrance pupils page.

Things didn't start off well. Part of the setup is to attach the wireless remote shutter
release. But it no longer fits! It fits into the USB connector of the older bodies (all
five that I have had), but the Mark II has a
different USB 3 connector. So I had to use
the shutter manually.

Then there's the issue of the position of the tripod mount. I've already established that
it's 12 mm further forward than on the Mark I, but it's also offset slightly to the
side—enough for it not to fit on the rail properly. A mounting screw that wasn't previously
an issue now offsets the body sideways. Not a big issue (I can remove it), but another
surprise. And the difference in the tripod mount position had another effect: the side rail
sticks further into the image. Here last week (Mark I) and today:

The end of the rail is visible on bottom right of both images, but it's now much more
pronounced. Fortunately Hugin ignores it. Today's photo also shows my shadow, needed because of the issue with the remote
control. The tripod is behind the shadow of a tree, so it's not visible.

And then there's the images themselves. This camera can take up to 60 full-resolution (20
MP) images per second. But like its predecessor, it won't do that for HDR images: there it
wants to use the mechanical shutter (why?), so it takes “only” 15 images a second. The
sound is quite impressive, though; it's significantly quieter than the Mark I, and the
difference in rate is also very obvious. Not surprisingly, there was no difference in the
processing.

One of the plants that we brought with us to Stones Road was
a Hedychium gardnerianum,
which for years I have confused with a species
of Helichrysum. We planted it next
to the cannas, but unlike the
cannas it barely grew, and didn't flower.

They're not exactly difficult plants to grow. Why were they so reticent? Partially water
(a problem now solved), but has the soil something to do with it? We've been here for
nearly 2 years; hopefully the garden will take off soon.

Reading the online “instructions” for the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II (the toy guide only has an invalid pointer), found that the camera has a dedicated input for
a shutter remote control, something that sounds financially suboptimal. It requires a
dedicated remote control from Olympus, the RM-CB2 Remote
Cable, with the information that it is a “mini-plug type (2.5Φ)”.

I suppose that means a 2.5 mm phone plug. That's very plausible. On closer examination,
that's the connector to my remote control:

So all I need is a short cable with 2.5 mm connector at each end. That must be available,
right? Off to eBay to take a look. Yes, 2.5
mm cables available starting at $1 including postage. Oh, but the other end is 3.5 mm.
Always! I finally found a single cable with 2.5 mm connectors at each end—and it was 5 m
long, clearly not what I need here.

What do I do? I don't even know how many contacts the connector should have. My guess is
that the 3 contact connector on my remote control is only there because nobody does 2
contact connectors any more, so it should work. But do I look for a pre-made cable or build
one myself? In the Good Old Days, it was cheaper to build one yourself, but nowadays that
wisdom no longer holds.

What's the Olympus OM-D
E-M1 Mark II like for horse photos? The 15 shots per second should be useful in
looking at gaits. So I took a series of photos at the highest mechanical repeat rate of 15
fps. It wasn't fast enough. Here three successive photos:

There is only one intermediate photo per leg change. More to the point, though, in this
second I only got 8 images. Why? I can go up to 60 images per second with the electronic
shutter, and some time I will, though I'm mainly concerned about the data flood that it
entails. Do I stay true to form and keep every image? That's 1.2 GB per second!

Didn't do much with my new camera today: I was too busy checking things, and I still haven't really explored
the new features. About the only thing I have decided is that I need better instructions.
And if nobody else does them, maybe it's time for me to do so. Started working on a
framework, but it'll be a long time before they're finished, if ever.

I've already established compatibility issues with the remote flash trigger. Are there
others? Last month I found that the Olympus VF-2 viewfinder fits the E-M1, giving it the choice of no less than 3 viewfinders:

It even has a use: as a viewfinder from above in situations that are too bright for the LED
screen. Does it work on the Mark II? No! It fits into the accessory port between the
flash shoe and the real viewfinder:

So that doesn't work. And neither do the other accessories for the port, notably the toy
flash units, but also the PENPAL, a
device for sending mutilated images
via Bluetooth (“The image size can be
selected from 640x480 (default setting), 1280x960 and 1920x1440”). That almost makes
Olympus' broken wireless networking look good, and it's not surprising that the Mark II
doesn't support it. On the positive side, it meant that the Mark II came with a more
flexible and powerful external flash. I never used the toy flashes, so the only real impact
is the viewfinder.

And the remote shutter release? How does it work, anyway? Found a splitter cable and tried
both the output of the remote shutter:

I couldn't measure any output from the shutter release, but there was no measurable
resistance from the camera contacts either. I wonder how this thing really works. Then I
found a couple of threads on the subject. This one confirmed that the standard connectors for Canon cameras work, though another (which I can
no longer find) claimed that a similar cable for Panasonic cameras doesn't work. In
passing, also discovered the real reason for the three contact plug:

The ring closest to cable is ground, 2nd ring (middle) is focus and the tip is shutter
release.

In passing, it seems that the very cheapest cable ($2.55), is only just cheaper than the
cheapest (cabled) remote control ($2.71). Cables can cost me up to $12 or so, and the
wireless remote controls are a little over $20. I couldn't find an Olympus RM-CB2 Remote
Cable on eBay, presumably because at its recommended price of $79 it just doesn't
sell. Why does Olympus even bother to make it?

After last week's débacle with PayPal, I've been keeping an eye on the
transaction. On Thursday, I got
an email telling me that my account was negative, and that I should do something about
it. But the account showed that was balanced, and there was no evidence that the money had
been deducted from any of my bank accounts. And that's the way it was until today, so I
sent them a message via their internal system pointing out the issue and asking them to
contact me. The say that they'll take up to 24 hours to respond, so I'll wait for that.

And then Callum Gibson pointed out something to me. You can find the transaction
booking details if you know how. Here's the entry in question:

Well hidden! Even the people at PayPal didn't know about it. It's also somewhat clunky:
it's really a lot of work to see the details of all transactions. And apart from that,
there was no such deduction from my credit card.

But things didn't stop there. On Wednesday Lyle claimed to have reset my “one-touch” pay on eBay, so I checked that. No difference:

But looking more carefully, there's a more obvious link on the left:
“Change”. And how about that, with that you can change the
payment source. Why didn't I see that? To be fair, once again nobody at PayPal knew it
either. But this saga seems to have a positive side: now I know how to do it. And, so far
at least, I seem to have gained the best part of $2,500.

Yes, not completely sharp,but not bad. The smearing is due to the cat moving, not the
camera. But there's a serious problem with this photo: I had grabbed the wrong camera, and
this was taken with the E-M1 Mark I. I'll repeat that some other time.

So which should I try next? “Better” and “faster” are hard to quantify. So I decided to
try out high resolution mode. Page 99 of the “instructions” refers mainly to page 46, which
contains only a reference to page 48, which contains some information, but not really
enough:

Choose from JPEG (50M F or 25M F) and JPEG+RAW modes. When image quality is set to
RAW+JPEG, the camera saves a single RAW image (extension ".ORI") before combining it with
the high resolution shooting. Pre-combination RAW images can only be played back on the
software that comes with this camera.

If that were correct, the raw images would be useless: Olympus no longer supplies software
with the camera. And it's saying a lot to claim that other software can't process the
images, though probably at the moment that's the case. But how do I choose? They don't
say. It wasn't until after I took my photos and found the raw images missing that I found,
in another place:

After setting high resolution shooting, you can select the image quality of the high
resolution shooting using image quality mode (P. 55, 88).

And that relates to the standard menu settings that chooses between raw
and JPEG, and also sets the size and quality
of the JPEGs. Now isn't that tacky! Yes, it's directly related, but to use the menus
properly you first need to deselect hi-res mode, go back into the menu system, set quality
for normal images, then select hi-res mode and do it all over again. I hope that will
change with the next firmware update.

Took my photos, comparing all four camera bodies. They still need processing, but the first
thing I see is that I underestimated the resolution of even the E-PM1:

And I didn't get any raw images because of the strange menu system. Another thing to repeat
some time. Still, the high resolution mode does seem to have made a difference. Here
images in normal (20 MP) mode and 50 MP:

In passing, it's interesting to note that I had been listening to the wrong reports about
the high resolution mode. I had heard something about 80 MP, but it seems that the maximum
(currently) is 50 MP. They're known to be still working on it, so that could change. But
why do they offer a 25 MP mode? That doesn't seem to be worth the effort when the native
resolution is 20 MP.

Another thing to check was whether Olympus has improved the “wireless networking”
capability. No. This time I was completely unable to connect to my iPhone. That's probably me losing my way
on the stepping stones, not the camera. It worked on the Samsung phone after the usual
pain.

My new Olympus OM-D
E-M1 Mark II does video. I don't. But today once again I ran into a particularly
irritating bug in DxO
Optics “Pro”: when I have a large number of images and want to deselect one, it
repositions the view of the images, and I have to reposition. For Every Single
Image.

How do you describe that? A video would be good. So I took a video:

It wasn't until later that I noticed a number of issues, by which time I didn't care any
more:

The view of the monitor wasn't straight, and that was more irritating than I had
expected.

As a result, the 75 second video was 564 MB in size, and it was too big to fit any of my
screens. Maybe that's related to the moiré.

That's not a disadvantage of the camera, of course, but it makes me wonder if I really need
4K video. It also shows the importance of careful setup. It's relatively straightforward
to reshape a photo, but how do you do it with videos?

In Kleins Road we had a number
of Buddlejas which flowered from January
to July. We took cuttings with us, but none of them survived. A few months back Yvonne took some more cuttings and propagated them in pots. They didn't
do well, and about half of them died, including—as it turned out—all of the dark
blue Buddleja davidii
cultivars. Yvonne wanted to plant them in the soil—in the middle of summer! I was against
it, but since they weren't doing well, I agreed.

It was the right choice. Today, on the last day of summer, we finally have the first
flowers: